Team Lead - Trading

The role

You will lead the team building Alpaca's algo trading platform. You will design and architect the platform, write code, make technical decisions, and own the team's roadmap and delivery.

What you will do

• Technical direction and architecture for the team's services
• Roadmap and delivery by breaking down business goals into engineering work
• Day-to-day execution including sprint planning and unblocking engineers
• Setting code and design quality standards through reviews and contributions
• Production ownership including reliability, latency, and correctness targets
• Hiring, onboarding, and career growth for a small team of engineers
• Cross-team collaboration with product, operations, compliance, clearing and other engineering teams

Required qualifications

• Senior or staff level software engineer who has led a team
• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers through mentoring and feedback
• Track record of delivering complex systems on schedule
• Coding skills in C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, or Python
• Low latency and high throughput optimization
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
• Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems and concurrency control
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
• Clear written and verbal communication
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and limited process

Nice to have

• Experience hiring and building out an engineering team from a small base
• Experience owning a production trading or brokerage system as the accountable lead
• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (primarily GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

About the company

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. The company serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries.